The Austin-based Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas has awarded San Antonio researchers $7.6 million in grants. The beneficiary of that new funding is the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio’s Cancer Therapy & Research Center.

While this is a healthy sum compared to previous allocations, its substantially less than institutions elsewhere in Texas have been granted by CPRIT in this latest funding round.

The CTRC grants are among more than 100 awarded by CPRIT this week totaling $107 million. The largest single San Antonio grant is $2 million, awarded by CPRIT to the Health Science Center for the recruitment of researcher Kexin Xu, Ph.D., from the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School.

“This is fantastic news for CTRC to get $7.6 million,” says Health Science Center President Dr. William Henrich about the latest CPRIT funding. “It’s a substantial increase over what we have previously received. It certainly establishes the investigators who have received these funds as top-tier cancer researchers.”

A San Diego company, Curtana Pharmaceuticals, has been awarded $7.5 million by CPRIT in this latest round. The firm is relocating to Austin.

CPRIT has awarded the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston more than $21.3 million for 25 individual investigator research grants.

Meanwhile, CPRIT has awarded more than $10 million in individual investigator research grants to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

San Antonio’s cut of the nearly $51.3 million in individual investigator research grants is $3.5 million.

Texas voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2007 establishing CPRIT and authorizing the State to fund the institute through the issuance of $3 billion in bonds. The agency drew fire in 2012 over allegations it has improperly awarded some grants.

In November 2013, CPRIT’s Oversight Committee named Wayne R. Roberts as the institutes’s new CEO. Roberts had served as interim executive director of CPRIT since December 2012, when he was hired to work with the Texas Legislature to stabilize the agency.

“The breadth of funding that CPRIT has provided for our scientists is a vote of confidence in their extraordinary work to prevent and to treat cancer on all possible fronts,” says CTRC Director Dr. Ian M. Thompson Jr.

Thompson adds, however, that the competition for research funding “is greater than ever seen before.”

Henrich says other institutions in Texas are locking up more grant money from CPRIT, at least in part, because they have the ability to submit a greater number of applications.

“The amount you get is reflective to a certain degree to the number of grants you submit,” Henrich explains. “Our investigators are writing a lot of grants. And our success rate is good. It’s just that we are playing a numbers game and (some of the competing institutions) have a deeper bench with more people.”